Like most people of my generation, my first exposure to the cinema of Hong Kong was via films starring the immortal Bruce Lee, followed by Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. Later on, it was a thrill to discover the visceral bullet ballet films of John Woo, often starring Chow Yun-Fat, especially A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Hard Boiled (1992). And then, there is the entire oeuvre of Wong Kar-Wai, Johnnie To and the Pang brothers, Danny and Oxide; and of course, the redoubtable Stephen Chow. Before that, there was the mighty Shaw Brothers slate from the late 50s to the mid-70s, with my all-time favourite being King Hu’s martial arts epic Come Drink With Me (1966). Of late, however, and this might be just my fevered misconception, I seemed to be watching less and less films from Hong Kong, and those that I saw seemed to be less than memorable. This quickly changed when I came across a brace of new films from the territory.
The first one that came my way was Emily Ting’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong (2016). In the style of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), the film is a walk-and-talkathon, but rather than being set over one night, this film is set over two, a year apart. Ting produced The Kitchen (2012), that starred Bryan Greenberg, and here, she casts him alongside Jamie Chung. It takes tremendous chemistry to pull off a two-hander, and it helps that Greenberg and Chung are a real-life couple. The film is about a man and a woman meeting by chance and being inexorably attracted to each other, despite having partners. As with Before Sunrise , the dialogue sparkles. Ting packs her scripts with witticisms and sharp observations. For example, Chung plays a Los Angeleno of Hong Kong ancestry, who can speak no Cantonese, and Greenberg a New Yorker resident in Hong Kong who can. Chung asks Greenberg why her grandparents who moved to California were called immigrants, while he who’s moved to Hong Kong is called an expat. The film ends on a deliciously tantalising note.
The portmanteau film Ten Years (2015) couldn’t be more different in tone to Ting’s film. Set in the Hong Kong of 2025, this collection of five shorts wears its political heart on its sleeve, exploring the fractious relationship between Hong Kong and China. Inspired by the Hong Kong protests of 2014, Kwok Zune’s Extras takes up cudgels against the National Security Law. In Wong Fei-Pang’s Season of the End , the protagonists try to save cultural artefacts from homes that are being systematically destroyed. Jevons Au’s Dialect looks at how the Chinese government’s attempt to impose Mandarin results in Cantonese being marginalised. Chow Kwun-Wai’s Self-Immolator is also directly linked to the National Security Law and takes a close look at the Hong Kong independence movement. And Ng Ka-Leung’s Local Egg is a surreal take on the Chinese government’s attempt to destabilise the Hong Kong egg industry.
While Ten Years paints a dystopian future of Hong Kong, the filmmaking tomorrows of the territory appear to be in safe hands.
